I have a thought running in my mind that I have revisited from time to time. It’s about how I would like things to be in my ideal world which is very different from how things are actually happening in this world. In the RKG Discord, there are two other people who identify as agender, much to my surprise and delight. There was a discussion happening about gender, and I said I could write a 5,000-word treatise on how I realized I was agender. One of them stated interest in reading said treatise if I ever wrote it, and that’s what cemented this series of posts in my mind.
Even stating the paragraph above, I feel an immediate impulse to explain myself. I didn’t realize I was agender so much as I realized that I didn’t care about gender. That the more I thought about it, the more I got confused about it. How if I had thouught about it thirty years ago, I probably would have called myself nonbinary and been done with it.
Now, however, it doesn’t fit any better than any other gender does. And I would love to explain why that is and how it’s not so much that I chose agender as much as I rejected all the other labels. Which is how I work in general. Nothing fits, so I choose the label that least doesn’t fit. Or to put it another way, I choose the label that fits the least worst.
I’ve had this issue with many different aspects of my being, and I would love to delve more deeply and thoroughly in each of them. Those would be religion (areligious), sexuality (bisexual), and gender (agender). I have thought about each of them quite a bit, and in the end, I threw up my hands and said, “That’s good enough.”
I get frustrated because I think so hard about each of these issues. With religioun, it was pretty easy for me to say that I wasn’t religious, but to which degree? I’m not arrogant enough to believe that I can say for sure there’s nothing out there. Plus, it’s hard to believe there’s absolutely nothing when the fact that humans exist speak to the contrary.
I believe there’s some kind of greater being/entity/collective, but–and I’m going to leave that there because this post is about the structure of the series, not delving into the isuses themselves. Consider that a teaser of things to come.
In the last post, I was talking about how different parts of myself can’t be compartmentalized. I also mentioned that I was a socialist and an anarchist, but those aren’t separate things. I’m also a pragmatic capitalist. And yes, I made up that term just now. What I mean by it is that I acknowledge that people want to make money. People want to thrive, and I have no problems with that. What I do have a problem with is not making sure that everyone is able to survive.
Look. I take this as a basic requirement for being a part of a society. As a collective, we should do what we can for every individual of said collective. I know this is not something all Americans believe (or even most?), but it’s at the very core of my own beliefs. Which is why I identify as a socialist. But, I also know that people need to be allowed to shine at different levels, which is the pragmatic/capitalistic part of me.
As for the anarchist, one reason I didn’t consider it is because I do believe in a (limited) hierarchy and (limited) government. I truly don’t think we could get any shit done as individuals without anybody in charge/leading. It’s hard enough when it’s just a bunch of friends trying to figure out where to go on a Friday night. If one person doesn’t take the lead, no one is going anywhere.
To me, it seems pretty simple that a society/community has a responsibility to all the members of the community to ensure that they have shelter, food, and an access to healthcare. I have explained before that when it comes to healthcare, I think everyone should have basic coverage. No one should go bankrupt or lose their home because they have to go to the hospital. Everyone should be able to go to the doctor once a year. At the bare minimum.
I don’t think it’s too much to ask, honestly. In America, any time someone wants to grouse about paying for this and that (with taxes), my retort is and will always be, “If we cut a billion dollars from the defense budget, we could cover everything else.” I’ve felt this way for decades, and you cannot dissuade me from this position. We spend the most for defense, no matter how you look at it. $900+ billion, which is three times the amount that China spends. It’s 3.4% of our GDP whereas China’s is 1.7% of their GDP. Russia is third with $109 billion, which is 5.9% of their GDP.
You’re telling me we can’t cut a measly billion dollars from that? I don’t buy it, and I never will. EVER.
Back to anarchy.
I am not a strict anarchist as I’ve mentioned. Honestly, I’m too much of a minority to be one of those. Sad, but true. If no one was in charge, people like me would be the first to go. Not to say we’re not, anyway, but I give us a better chance of surviving with a good government in place. Do I like that? No. Would I prefer not to have a government/hierarchy? Yes.
One of my biggest complaints about Democrats is that they won’t take a stand for what they believe in. The party, I mean. They water it down or equivocate or try to make it as palatable as possible. They try to appeal to everyone, and it doesn’t appeal to anyone. I have never felt wanted as a Democrat. I felt taken for granted beacuse, well, I was NOT going to vote for a Republican. I was resentful of that. I only felt good voting for Barack Obama, and less so the second time than the first. Not beacuse he did anything wrong, but just because it’s impossible to sustain that kind of high.
Every election before that and since, I have dutifully done my duty. I have voted in every election I could, but I have not had any joy in doing so. The only time I ever felt seen was when Barack Obama ran as a candidate the first time because he mentioned Asian people and nonreligious people. Once he was elected, he actually said ‘bisexual’. Out loud! It may seem trivial, but it’s such a big thing when your entire identity is ignored in every other aspect of politics/media.
I have felt taken for granted for most of my life (politically) because I don’t really have a choice. It’s Democrats or nothing, but it’s always feels like the lesser of two evils. In 2008, I went into the primaries equally open to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I was excited to have a female candidate and a black candidate, both of whom were more than qualified to be president.
Over the next month, I listened to and read everything each had to say. Obama won me over; it’s as simple as that. In part, it’s because he’s such a fantastic speaker, but it’s also because his policies were more aligned with my own. Clinton, for better and for worse, was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. She embodied the Democartic Party whereas Obama was the fresh-faced kid who exuded hope and new ideas.
By the way, he’s a moderate. I mean, he’s progressive in ideas, but a moderate in practice because he’s pragmatic (and a black man in the United States). But he spoke with such passion and constantly appealed to people’s better nature. He believed in the best of us (or at least convincingly conveyed that he did), and it was infectious.
I’m excited. For the first time in 12 years, I’m…hopeful? And that is a dangerous thing because I was ready for America to go to hell. I was resigned to losing the election because this country is a fucking joke. And then, Kamala Harris did the unexpected and chose Tim Walz, my governor, as her running mate. I knew he was one of the finalists, but I assumed she would be sensible and choose someone from a swing state. Governor Josh Shapiro from Pennsylvania was the one who was mentioned the most often. I figured it would be him.
This morning, I woke up to the news that Harris had chosen Walz. Immediately, my mood lifted 100%. When it was *sigh* Biden running for reelection, I just could not muster any enthusiasm. At all. It was incredible to me that it was that close at all. And it sucked that the Supreme Court was intent on ruining democracy. And Trump chose someone as his running mate who is, to put it politely, a complete jackoff with no redeeming qualities, which made me feel even more hopeless.
I had written this election off, incredibly. There are still so many people in my country who are that upset at losing their privilege (white cis dudes, mainly), they’ll vote for the gross old white dude who tells them what they want to hear. Even though he does not give a single shit about them. I did not like what it said about my country. I did not come back from the dead for this!
Then, Biden steepped down from the election. And Trump was classless as always in what he had to say about it. He could have simply said, “Good luck to him; I wish him wel.” If that was too much, he could have said nothing. But, no, he chose the ugliest thing to say because that is who he is.
There was a debate about who would replace him, but there reall ywas no confusion over that. It would be Harris because Biden left too late for it to be anyone but her. I was skeptical beacuse America couldn’t even manage to hire a white woman, let alone a black woman. But then I thought that weirdly, it might be easier for a black woman because progressive white dudes would probably be more willing to vote for a black woman than a wihte one (three-thousand words here why that is true).
By the way, when I said to him a few months before my medical crisis (in early September of 2021) that something was because he was on the spectrum, and he went quiet. I said it that way because I assumed he knew. He’s a textbook case; he really is.
A few weeks later, he mentioned it to me. He had not known he was on the spectrum so my comment hit him hard. He’s like me in that once he hears of something, he researches it. He hit up the Googles and was shooketh at how accurate it was. he told me that it really helped him make sense out of–well his life.
Side note: I regret I did not tell him earlier. I know it’s not my job to tell him about himself, but I’ve known for decades that he’s on the spectrum. I could have said him so much grief had I told him earlier. Truth to be told, I thought it was so obvious, I did not need to bring it up.
And, yes, I was (and am) his younger sibling. Still. I can’t help feeling gulity because it’s been drummed into my head that I am responsible for the feelings of everyone around me. For example, when my brother got divorced almost two years ago, my mother asked if I was going over to clean and cook for my brother.
She said these words out loud. As if they were normal words. You have to know that if the situation was reversed, she would not have asked my brother the same thing. It was because she perceived me as a woman and of course it’s a woman’s duty to cook and clean for the men around her!
Here’s the funny part. My brother is a much better cook than I am–and he enjoys it. He has two older teenage boys in his house who are perfectly capable of coking and cleaning, too. I finally told her, “I don’t do either of those for myself; why would I do it for him?”
My mother did not appreciate that. At all. She actually snapped at me in a snide voice with a nasty tone that he was so busy and could do with the help especially since the divorce. My ex-SIL did not do much of the cooking or cleaning, anyway, for much of the marriage. And, again, there were two late-teen boys who were bodily able to cook and clean.
But, see, in my mother’s brain, there is only One True Way to woman, and what I was doing ain’t it. What I was doing was NEVER it.
If she weren’t my mother, I would have much more compassion for her. Because it’s very sad to be stuck in her head. First of all, she is very anxious. I would say diagnosable anxious. Like, put her on some meds anxious. With a side helping of germaphobia. No, that’s not a real word, but it describes perfectly what I mean.
I want to talk more about neurodiversity. Yes, again. Deal with it. Did you know that part of ADHD is hyperfocus? It’s OK if you didn’t because many people don’t. Rightly so because it’s always talkead about as if it’s just a lack of focus or the inability to focus, but it doesn’t have to be either of those.
I have lived all my life knowing there is something wrong with me. It has been said to me over and over again in so many different ways. I was talking with my Taiji teacher today about this. One of the reasons I liked her from the beginning is because she was very honest about her own weird childhood. She grew up in bumfuck, South Dakota to parents who were not the most supportive. We could relate with each other on this level.
She was bullied as a child as was I. She told me that it reached the point where she realized that she could do nothing wrong–so she might as well do what she wanted. She added that she never thought she was a bad person so that helped her push back.
In may case, I thought I was a stain on the world and that it would be better off without me. This is something my parents imparted on me, mostly implicitly, but in a few explicit ways. No, not that they actually said that I was worthless, but the way my mother nitpicked and criticized (still does) everything I said, thought, felt, had the same implied message. I was wrong as I was, and I better not let the real me show.
Here are just some of the things that she has made very clear she does not care for one bit in me:
1. My sexuality. I’m bisexual. I realized that when I was in my early twenties. When I told my mother, she did not take it well at all. For many reasons.
There were several times before then, though.
2. Me being a tomboy. This was something that early on, had I recognized it, should have clued me in on how the rest of my life was going to go.
I’ve been musing about how I would order the world once I am in charge of it. Which will be never, by the way. Yesterday, I veered into family dysfunction and empathy, which were related (hah), but not the main point I wanted to talk about.
In my ideal world or my diversity town, I would come up with a way to show people how they are privileged. I mean, that’s the whole point of diversity town. For those in a position of privilege to realize that what they consider normal is, in fact, privilege.
One thing I remember was being in a diversity training (not as the trainer) in which we were talking about how people of minority are treated on the daily. Microtrangressions, if you will. I mentioned being followed in stores plus other microtransgressions, and several white people tried to argue each incident and why it might not be racism.
One incident I mentioned was that at the Cubs I’ve been going to for all my life, I was once asked to show identification when writing a check (yes, this was in the Stone Ages), and I watched the next several people after me check out. One, a white woman, wrote a check, and she was not asked to show ID. Yes, I made sure to test this because I wanted to make sure the hunch I had was right. I wasn’t going to do anything about it, but I needed to check it for my own sanity.
In the training, a white woman trotted out the tired excuse that maybe the checker was having a bad day or maybe she was checking everyone. I mentioned that I had watched her NOT check a white woman, which shut down that vein of conversation. While maybe the checker was having a rough day, it’s not a coincidence that she chose the Asian person to exert a bit of power on. As I said, I had been shopping there for several decades and had never been asked for my ID before. It was racism, pure and simple.
One thing that is so frustrating about any ism is when a person of the majority simply will not believe the words of the minority. I am not saying never to question someone who is speakng on the topic, but the first thing a non-minority person should do is listen. This is something that is emphasized more these days, much to my appreciation.
I’m back to talk about my ideal world once again. In the last post, I went off on a rant about sexism. I can’t promise I won’t do it again. I have a lot to say about gender especially as it’s becoming an issue again with the expansion of gender as we currently define it.
One thing I got into yesterday was how I don’t get gender. I don’t get a lot of the arbitrary categories we throw people into. I get (even if I don’t necessarily agree with) racial categories. I get religion, obviously, and disabilities in general. I mean, I understand that disabilities are…I was going to say each one was a discrete thing, but that’s not even true. There are things that spill over or are shared between differing disabilities. And the fact that there is such a thing as hidden disabilities–I’m just all over the place, aren’t I?
My point is that it’s not so easy to say someone is abled or disabled when you get past what we think of as obvious disabilities (being in a wheelchair, for example). Nobody is 100% healthy. Well, very few people. But that’s another post altogether.
In my ideal world, I want people to be aware of other people. It’s really that simple. But not that easy to get there. It took me so long to realize that people don’t automatically try to understand people who are not like them.
Side note: I have had to do that all my life. I was taught at a very young age that I was the keeper of my mother’s emotions. She would pour out her pain to me for hours every night–mostly about my father cheating on her. I don’t remember if she mentioned his cheating explicitly, but we all knew that was what was happening.
My father did not hide it, by the way. He didn’t see any reason to hide it because if he was doing it, then it was fine. I’m not being snarky or hyperbolic, by the way. My father is a narcissist in the classic sense of the word, and he didn’t feel the need to justify anything he did. If he wanted to do it, then he did it. Why would he not?
Side note: Here’s the fascinating thing. I used to thinki that my father did not love anyone other than himself. Then, I thought maybe he loved my mother if he loved anyone. Now, howeve,r I don’t think he even loves himself. He certainly does not (or did not) enjoy life. He never had anything positive to say about anything, and I can’t remember many times when he smiled in delight about anything.
When I was in my twenties, my relationship with my parents was very rocky. That’s putting it mildly, by the way. Every time I talked to them on the phone (they had moved back to Taiwan when I was in my early twenties (father) and late twenties (mother). Or maybe early thirty for my mother), I was suicidal by the time I hung up. That’s not me exaggerating, either.
One time, my father was here after a conference in the west somewhere (can’t remember where). We got into a fight about something. Again, I can’t remember, but it’s not important. At some point, he demanded to know if I was grateful for all he’d done for me (home, money, etc. It was a lot. I’m not denying that). I told him that I wasn’t because I was a raging ball of anger at the time. Plus, he had pushed me so hard, I wanted to hit him where it had a chance of hurting.
He looked at me with such hatred in his eyes, I mentally recoiled. He spit out at me, “Then why should I love you?”
I died inside at that moment, but it also was a moment of such clarity. I had a sense by the time I was seven or eight that he did not love me. I knew it by the time I was in my early twenties. To hear him say it with such spitefulness was a blessing in disguise. I didn’t have to question it any longer.
Even though I knew it on some level, and even though I felt numb about my parents at that time, it still broke my heart. I simply said, “You’re my father. It’s your job to love me.”
I could not believe I had to say that to him. But that’s part of being a narcissist–the idea that you could love someone just for themselves is beyond you (or might be. I know it’s not the same for everyone).
My fdather is in the late stages of dementia, and it’s pretty grim. It’s weird talking to him now because he’s more expressive than he was earlier in his life. After I told him that he should love me because it was part of his job as my father, he started telling me he loved me when we talked on the phone, but it was very stilted.
Now, he’ll tell me with emotion in his voice that he loves me. I believe he actually believes it. Or at least that he loves the person he thinks of as his daughter. This was something I figured out after my medical crisis: neither of my parents love me as a person. They can’t because they don’t actually know me. And what they do know, they don’t like. I don’t think there is a single aspect of my personality that they think is a good thing. I made my peace with their disapproval, well, mostly.
How did I end up there again? My point is that I have had to soothe their emotions for all my life. I don’t know if I’m innately empathetic, but I have honed that skill over forty-plus years. Itt’s become second-nature to me, which is a positive AND a negative. Would I have chosen it for myself? I don’t know.
Back when I was in my twenties, it was the rage to say that bad things happened to people to make them have empathy. That enraged me because I didn’t think I needed to have gone through the horrid things I did in order to be empathetic.
I have realized, however, that some people do need to go through bad things in order to get empathy. Mainly, people who have been born into several categories of privilege and have not experienced the hard knocks many of us suffer through.
It’s so hard to explain privilege to people who have it because it’s normal to them. You can’t show the absence of something as easily as you can add to an experience/equation.
I have more to say about my ideal world because of course I do. In the last post, I was talking about From games, cishet white dudes assuming they’re the norm, and a bunch of other things.
Side note (yes, this early): That’s the way my brain works. I have discovered this is a neurodiversity thing, which makes sense. People get very exasperated with me because I can’t keep from going off on a tangent. In my writing, I love a side note, a footnote, an aside, and just anything that takes me down a different road.
Everything is interconnected to me. I can’t compartmentalize, which is to my detriment. I find it funny that I was talking about interconnectedness about a decade before it came a thing. I did not understand looking at, say, race without including gender. Things have an impact on most or all aspects of my life in different ways, and it isn’t as if I could turn off, say, being Taiwanese for a day.
There are some things about me that you wouldn’t know right off the bat just by looking at me. And there are some that you would. In the latter category, the following are included: fat, Taiwanese (Asian) American, AFAB, and old (although I look younger than my actual age).Included in the former are: neurogivergent, agender, and bisexual.
Even though I listed them separately here, I feel them all at the same time to varying extents. Each is a piece of the puzzle that makes up me, and if any one of those pieces is missing–well, it’s just not me.
There are other pieces, of course, including me being a writer, Taiji (especially the weapons) and now Bagua, my passion for FromSoft games, and others.
In my ideal world, I would be able to talk about any of these with ease. I would not feel like I had to hide any aspect of my personality/being. Not to say that I would talk about any or all of them all the time because there’s a time and place for everything, but ideally, I would not feel I could not talk about any of them at all.
I did not begin to suspect I had a neurodivergency until I was in my thirties. Even then, it was just a whisper of a hint of an idea. I have mentioned that the fact that I was talking about ADHD on Twitter with a friend and I said that I didn’t think I could have it because I was able to focus on one thing –sometimes, for a very long time.
He told me that hyperfocus was actually an indication of ADHD, which was news to me. I didn’t pursue it at the time, but I filed it away for further reference. Then I didn’t pull it out again for at least a decade.
In the last post, I was musing about what my ideal world would look like. Of course, it’s difficult to say because I can’t account for every issue that we would come up against, but I did mention a few of the bigger ones. Racism, sexism, queerphobia, classism, and ableism. Of course, there are more than just those (religious intolerance and ageism spring to mind), which proves my point that you really can’t fix everything. In fact, even if all these issues were to suddenly disappear, others would spring up in their place. Why? Because human beings love to categorize and to belong to a team. In order to be part of a team, you have to have someone(s) who are not on the team.
Here’s the thing. It’s fine and dandy to say that in my diversity town (instead of my ideal world) it would be cishet white dudes who would go through the experience in order to learn. The problem is that assumes that if someone is a minority in one area, then they would be sympathetic to other minorities.
This is most emphatically not true.
You would think I would have known this ages ago, but I foolishly assumed the best of people back when I was in my twenties and thirties. In fact, when I was in college, I had a friend who was adamant that I was an optimist. I was so offended because I was a cynical pessimist, damn it. He listened to me rant for a good five minutes before calmly saying, “You expect people to do the right thing and then are disappointed when they don’t. That makes you an optimist.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but then I closed it again. He was right. I did expect people to do/say the right thing. I was disappointed when that didn’t pan out. In other words, I was an optimist. Damn it. I was cynical because I kept getting my expectations dashed.
Side note: The reason I started thinking about all this is because I was getting frustrated in the RKG Discord when a few people would not acknowledge that Sekiro was not for everyone. Though no one would be so mean as to say ‘git gud’, it pretty much is that sentiment.
It’s fascinating as well as frustrating to see people (let’s face it. Mostly cishet white dudes) not be able to see that they are not the norm. And, to be fair, in this case, the Discord was built around From games (loosely), so many of the people who are in the Discord are From fans. I am, too, but I am not good at them. And I am one of the few people who can recognize that.